We examine the power of media narratives to counter prejudice, a dimension often overlooked in a literature that predominantly documents how media reinforce it. We study an unprecedented experiment from post-WWII United States: in 1946, amid entrenched racial divisions, the producers of the popular children's radio series The Adventures of Superman suddenly replaced its usual fantasy plots with stories confronting intolerance in American society, designed to elicit moral and emotional engagement among millions of young listeners. The shift generated exogenous variation in exposure to anti-prejudice narratives across cohorts and locations. We show that childhood exposure produces lasting changes in social and political preferences, including greater racial tolerance, stronger support for civil rights, and higher civic mobilization later in life. These individual-level effects translate into societal shifts in favor of civil rights.

We examine the role of FM radio in mitigating violent conflict. We collect original data on radio broadcasts encouraging defections during the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency. This constitutes the first quantitative evaluation of an active counterinsurgency policy that encourages defections through radio messages. Exploiting random topography-driven variation in radio coverage along with panel variation at the grid-cell level, we identify the causal effect of messaging on violence. Broadcasting defection messages increases defections and reduces fatalities, violence against civilians, and clashes with security forces. Income shocks have opposing effects on both the conflict and the effectiveness of messaging.

Urbanization can generate large economic gains, but it presents electoral risks for incumbents. This paper studies the economic and political effects of a program to integrate rural migrants in a growing Mozambican city. We randomized city blocks into three arms: program delivery with or without the involvement of local leaders, and a no-program control. The program increased rural-to-urban migration across both treatment arms, but improved labor market integration and local incumbent electoral outcomes only with leader involvement. We also observe electoral spillovers in migrants' origin areas, no clientelistic responses, and no resident backlash. These findings show that city-level integration policies can deliver both economic and political returns.

When public services are funded through user fees, incentivizing providers to improve quality while holding nominal fees constant can have ambiguous welfare effects. We identify a novel channel, both theoretically and empirically, where incentives to enhance quality also intensify payment enforcement, leading to user exclusion. Using a randomized controlled trial in the context of water and sanitation services in the slums of two large Indian cities, we find that service quality and fee compliance improve as providers increase efforts in both maintenance and monitoring. However, heightened monitoring excludes users, generating negative externalities. These findings underscore the need for financing models that better align provider incentives with equitable access.

While much of the literature studies causes and consequences of war, the reverberations of peace have rarely been studied. By focusing on the universe of ceasefire agreements since 1993, we study the causal effect of peace on economic recovery using a regression discontinuity in time approach. We estimate these impacts by temporally and spatially matching information on ceasefires with granular data about violence and economic recovery, allowing us to observe their dynamics at highly disaggregated levels and in temporal proximity to their entry into force. Overall, ceasefires have a marginal effect on violence, with their effectiveness in curbing hostilities being greater in areas where conflict is active closer in time to the agreement. These effects are driven by reductions in state-based conflicts, while other types of hostilities or civilian involvement remain unaffected. Using high-frequency data on night-time luminosity, we show that ceasefires have a positive impact on economic recovery, corresponding to an increase of 5.5 per cent when the agreement enters into place. Despite the effect being temporary, we find that it is not driven by external interventions, such as internationally funded new development projects or peace missions.

Natural resources can have a negative impact on the economy through corruption and civil conflict. This paper tests whether information can counteract this political resource curse. We implement a large-scale field experiment following the dissemination of information about a substantial natural gas discovery in Mozambique. We measure outcomes related to the behavior of citizens and local leaders through georeferenced conflict data, behavioral activities, lab-in-the-field experiments, and surveys. We find that information targeting citizens and their involvement in public deliberations increases local mobilization and decreases violence. By contrast, when information reaches only local leaders, it increases elite capture and rent-seeking.

Corruption is often harmful for economic development, yet it is difficult to measure due to its illicit nature. We propose a novel corruption game to characterize the interaction between actual political leaders and citizens, and implement it in Northern Mozambique. Contrary to the game-theoretic prediction, both leaders and citizens engage in corruption. Importantly, corruption in the game is correlated with real-world corruption by leaders: citizens send bribes to leaders whom we observe appropriating community money. In corrupt behavior, we identify an important trust dimension captured by a standard trust game.

This paper shows that the narratives used by states to legitimize family ideals can causally influence fertility at scale. We study one of the clearest examples of a state undergoing a rapid ideological shift on the meaning of family—the mid-1990s democratic transition of Malawi—when the newly elected government abruptly replaced the long-standing pro-natalist stance of the previous regime with a modernization agenda built upon the expansion of contraceptive services and a narrative promoting the ideal of a modern family as smaller, rational, and future-oriented. Combining the timing of the transition with plausibly exogenous spatial variation in individuals' exposure to state radio, we find that higher exposure led to persistent fertility declines and delays in marriage and first birth. The evidence points to a shift in preferences and norms around reproduction, rather than changes in knowledge about family planning.

Transitory labor market shocks can have persistent effects on human capital if they distort beliefs about the returns to education. Using uniquely collected longitudinal data on parental subjective expectations in a middle-income setting with salient local labor market fluctuations, we exploit variation in local conditions to identify how shocks affect perceived returns to secondary schooling and subsequent educational investments. We show that increases in unemployment reduce expected income and help account for changes in secondary school attendance. To interpret these responses, we develop a structural model of schooling choice with dynamic belief updating that jointly matches expectations and educational investments. We show that deviations from rational updating amplify the impact of transitory shocks on human capital accumulation.

This article studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on household expenditure on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of North Macedonia that offers cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The recipient is randomised across municipalities, with payments targeted to either the mother or the father of the child. Targeting transfers to women increases the expenditure share on food by 4 to 5 percentage points. At low levels of food expenditure, there is a shift towards a more nutritious diet.

This article uses a novel identification strategy to measure power in the household. Our strategy is to elicit women's willingness to pay to receive a cash transfer instead of their spouse receiving it. We selected participants from a sample of women who had already participated in a policy intervention in Macedonia offering poor households cash transfers conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The programme randomised transfers at the municipality level to either household heads (generally a male) or mothers. We show that women who were offered the transfer on average have stronger measured empowerment. IV estimation confirms this result.

Since the Industrial Revolution, ocean water acidity has risen by 26% due to anthropogenic emissions—a process known as ocean acidification—posing a risk for marine life and the communities depending on it. This paper examines the consequences of ocean acidification for child health, using data from coastal regions in 36 low- and middle-income countries from 1972 to 2018, encompassing 41% of the world's coastal population. Leveraging short-term exogenous shifts in ocean acidity near human settlements for identification, we find that prenatal exposure to higher water acidity significantly raises the risk of death in the first months of life and impacts early childhood development. We show evidence consistent with these effects being associated with maternal malnutrition, as increased acidity reduces catches for small-scale fisheries, increasing seafood prices and reducing consumption of crucial nutrients. Our findings indicate limited adaptation to these impacts. We estimate that, absent intervention, ocean acidification could contribute to as many as 77 million neonatal deaths in this region by 2100—a consequence that should not be ignored in the projected cost of climate change.

We investigate how religion concordance influences the effectiveness of preventive health campaigns. Conducted during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in two major Indian cities marked by Hindu–Muslim tensions, we randomly assigned a representative sample of slum residents to receive either a physician-delivered information campaign promoting health-related preventive practices or uninformative control messages on their mobile phones. Messages, introduced by a local citizen (the sender), were cross-randomized to start with a greeting signaling either a Hindu or a Muslim identity, manipulating religion concordance between sender and receiver. We found that doctor messages increased compliance with recommended practices and beliefs in their efficacy. Our findings suggest that the campaign's impact is primarily driven by shared religion between sender and receiver, leading to increased message engagement and compliance with recommended practices. Additionally, we observe that religion concordance helps protect against misinformation.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop and test experimentally three phone-based interventions to increase vaccine acceptance in Mozambique. The first endorses the vaccine with a simple positive message. The second adds the activation of social memory on the country's success in eradicating wild polio with vaccination campaigns. The third further adds a structured interaction with the participant to develop a critical view toward misleading information and minimize the sharing of fake news. We find that combining the endorsement with the stimulation of social memory and the structured interaction increases vaccine acceptance and trust in institutions.

Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia, and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance. Evidence from this sample suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage.

Engaging in indoor residual spraying in areas with high coverage of mosquito bed nets may discourage net ownership and use. This paper analyses new data from a randomized control trial conducted in Eritrea, which surprisingly shows the opposite: indoor residual spraying encouraged net acquisition and use. One possible explanation for this finding is that there is imperfect information about the risk of malaria infection. The introduction of indoor residual spraying may have made the problem of malaria more salient, leading to a change in beliefs about its importance and to an increase in private health investments.

This study experimentally assesses the effects of temporary wage subsidies on employment in North Macedonia. The target group consists of vulnerable unemployed individuals participating in an employment program that provides employers with a subsidy covering half of the wage payments during the first year of employment, as well as training expenses. Applicants are initially matched to job openings and then randomly selected for job interviews with employers, who decide whether to hire them under the program's conditions. Using administrative records, we find that being selected for an interview results in a 14-percentage-point increase in the probability of being employed in the formal economy 3.5 years after the start of the program, and an 85% increase in employment duration.

The Great Recession, which began in 2008, brought about large contractions in aggregate consumption in many countries. We study the impact of heterogeneous decreases in demand on innovation investments by analyzing the evolution of innovation investments in a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms during the 2004–2013 period. We proxy heterogeneous variation in demand with net exit rates in the productive stratum of each firm. We find that a one standard deviation increase in exit rates is associated with reductions of 1.5% in the share of firms investing in innovation. The drop is larger for smaller firms, which also experience greater decreases in sales. Since smaller firms are most sensitive to demand drops, they are the natural candidates to be the target of policies devoted to increasing R&D activities during crises.